Freshwater Investor

The Economist had couple great articles about over-regulation in U.S. An excerpt and chart below showing the impact of Dodd-Frankenstien…. The law that set up America’s banking system in 1864 ran to 29 pages; the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 went to 32 pages; the Banking Act that transformed American finance after the Wall Street [...]

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Found this post about AOL ventures. Got me wondering why a company that is basically in liquidation would need a venture capital fund? AOL Venture, the venture capital arm of AOL, is one part early-stage investment firm and one part incubator of new and unique AOL products. The focus on seed and series A rounds [...]

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From Inc magazine…. “How do you know if your company will fail? While no one has a crystal ball, there are traps that snare entrepreneurs again and again. There are the obvious pitfalls (not knowing the market) and the not-so obvious (you may be your own worst enemy). Here, venture capitalists reveal the most common [...]

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From Inc here. “Today’s young entrepreneurs are motivated to start companies because they hate authority and want to break all the rules, according to a recent study of 250 business owners between the ages of 18 and 22 years old. The study, released by Humantelligence, a behavioral science research and consulting firm that provides online [...]

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From “Entrepreneurship – the Tech is the Easy Part” here “Why is it that so many entrepreneurs believe the tech is the be-all, end-all? Where did the notion come from that if you have nothing more than a killer application, website, algorithm..that you can build a multibillion dollar company? (I probably just dropped an f-bomb [...]

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Interesting article in Forbes, perfectly appropriate for Valentine’s Day. Best point is that while raising money may be like dating, a financial partnership is like marriage..for good and bad reasons. Pick your partners carefully. I was at a dinner party recently with an entrepreneur friend who had just secured big funding for her business—to the [...]

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Popular press continues to confuse private equity and venture capital. Each group comes out of the newsrooms as “vulture capital”. Rather than address obvious questions: how many businesses can be liquidated for a profit; or how often can you make money cutting costs with no growth; the following Op-Ed piece carefully explains the nature of [...]

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Bill Gross, the head of the largest bond manager in the world, has some great insights in his latest monthly commentary. Most policy makers seem to be convinced that a zero interest rate policy (ZIRP) is good in all circumstances and that the law of unintended consequences doesn’t apply to ZIPR. Gross believes otherwise: “First [...]

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According to William Blair, the average valuation for U.S. M&A activity in 2011 reached a new peak at 12 times EBITDA up 20% from 2010. A quick search of CapitalIQ shows nearly 2,000 companies in North America and Europe with market cap’s of more than $1 billion trading for less than 12x. So, if one [...]

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